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This qualitative case study explores how situated rationality is achieved and maintained between two coexisting institutional logics, ‘global’ financial efficiency and ‘local’ customer-owners, around a performance measurement system in a large cooperative bank. We focus especially on the relationship between financial performance measures and softer, cooperative and communal organisational values. The results highlight that communal values may be effectively used to smooth and manage managerial contradictions; thus, situated rationality for operations can be achieved and maintained. This may also explain the resilience and success of communal values and cooperatively formed organisations in markets, even though the efficiency of such organisations is sometimes doubted. This also indicates the potential of alternative, more responsible and moderate modes of banking and finance for healing some of the problems of an extreme style of capitalism. peerReviewed

In this chapter we analyze how local member banks shifted from local, vernacular, accounting, and performance measurement systems to centralized and standardized performance measurement systems in a cooperative bank organization. The member banks reduced the use of vernacular accounting systems (VAS) to achieve greater cost-efficiency and to meet regulation requirements, but they still maintained their strong local logics beside the cooperative unity logic, with only minimal or moderate conflict. We suggest that the power of individual actors, i.e., CEOs, affected the balance of these logics, and the way performance measurement (PM) targets were chosen at the local level from the standardized template. We found that the feeling of autonomy maintained by the member banks after the centralization aided the standardization. Moreover, we contribute to recent digitalization discussions and suggest that if a centralized accounting system provided by the group supports the local values, the local actors are more willing to adapt the system and reduce their use of VAS. peerReviewed